An Open Letter to the Editors of Discover Magazine
Second Letter
Third Letter

October 7, 2003
 

Dear Discover Editors,

I found several articles in the Sept. 2003 issue of Discover to be interesting and thought provoking.

However I also noticed that you’ve chosen to co-mingle religion into some of your articles.  Is that really necessary?  I would like to request that your team stop putting religious content into what are otherwise scientific magazine and web-based articles.  It is false advertising and generally deceptive when you negatively influence the public’s values by sneaking in such content under the guise of “scientific” information.


We are taller than our grandparents.  Experts generally agree that this is due to better nutrition and sanitation.  Nutrition affects each person’s growth and health.  In fact, down through history, until about the last hundred years or so, most persons around the world only ate local foods.  Lacking modern transportation and refrigeration our ancestors had diets mostly based on local foods.

And the quality of any local food – is directly dependant on the quality of local soil.  If the soil is low or missing in: iron, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, selenium, molybdenum, et cetera, then the foods produced will also exhibit such deficiencies.  This in turn would negatively affect the growth and health of all the plants, animals and humans in that area.  Logical, yes?

We’ve all seen persons (with a bent upper back) who haven’t had enough calcium in their diet for  10-20 years.  A calcium deficiency is pretty serious.  It affects not just the skeletal system but the circulatory and central nervous systems too.  A manganese deficiency also directly affects skeletal development.  And if a baby doesn’t get enough iodine as an infant then its mental capabilities will never fully develop (which is one main reason why we iodized table salt in the 1920’s).

Scientifically speaking, isn’t it theoretically possible (let’s make that: probable) that at least some of the odd looking human-like fossils we’ve found could be due to local malnutrition, or inbreeding, or some regionally common (in the past) debilitating disease?  Perhaps some … of these odd skeletons from the past have absolutely nothing to do with any believed evolutionary progression.

Out of the 6,000 to 7,000 fossilized human remains found (- the British Museum’s three volume, Catalogue of Fossil Hominids of the late 60’s detailed about 4,000 fossil hominids found by that time) to date, less then 1% are odd enough that evolutionary priests come forward and claim to have found “more evidence” that God is (per evolution’s presuppositions) weak, if extant at all.  But you’ve only got some 40-50 nutritionally deficient (or diseased or inbred) individuals on which to lean your case for believed human evolution.  The rest is contrived from inference or entirely invented by consensus.


I hold in my hand (as I’m writing this) the September 2003 issue of Discover.  Extreme anorexics (skeletons) walk across the front cover with the words: “Where Are We Going?”  Below it presumes “…Who was the first human? … and other great mysteries of human evolution.”  To top it off, literally, the banner question running above Discover asks, “Do Comets Hold the Secret to Life on Earth?”

I will answer these questions now:  Heaven or Hell, following this brief time of learning and testing (prep time) that we mistakenly call “life.”  Adam.  Regarding the mysteries of human evolution – I’ll give you a few more to ponder further below.  And, no, comets are nice though, and have been shown to all decay within thousands of years – as but one evidence that our Solar System is under 10,000 years old.  (No Oort’s Cloud out there; sorry, that’s another myth just like the Tooth Fairy.  No evidence at all for it.)

This issue states (Sept.03; vol. 24, no. 9, pg. 33) “The way human evolutionary studies are going these days, any article on the subject written more than a few months ago probably contains outdated information.”

Is this due to scientific advances, better evidence, or rather due to consensus changes?

Within the main pro-evolution article, by Carl Zimmer (Sept.03; vol. 24, no. 9, pg. 34) “Still, what we don’t know about our evolution vastly outweighs what we do know.  Age-old questions defy a full accounting, and new discoveries introduce new questions.”  And on pg. 37, “Fossils offer some clues, but opinion is divided over what the clues mean. … Paleoanthropologists can say even less about the oldest hominids, because they’ve found hardly anything below the skull.”  Finally, on pg. 41-42, “About H. erectus, all they can say is that the youngest H. erectus fossils, Indonesian skulls from perhaps 50,000 years ago, come from a time when our own species had already settled in Asia and moved on to Australia.  ‘We don’t know what the hell is going on there,’ says Klein.  ‘We need more fossils with good dates.  It’ll come – within a decade we’ll know something more about this.  ’Neanderthals left behind more hints, although the picture is still far from clear.”

Science is just the wrong primary tool to use for understanding one-time past events.  One could not use science to either prove or disprove the Battle of Gettysburg, for example.  Science deals with what is testable-repeatable, within the range of data interpretable by the five human senses.  One-time past events are not provable or disprovable using the tools of science.

For past events, like a murder case, the use of eyewitness testimony, motives of suspects, alibis, and other pertinent data can be combined with forensic science to form overriding legal standards as a whole.  Circumstantial evidence alone is incomplete and may be misinterpreted.  Science alone, like only counting iron bullet fragments in a field, could not satisfactorily “prove” that the Battle of Gettysburg ever took place.  Furthermore, evolutionists routinely ignore most of the scientific evidence that is there.  This then deceives the public.  Your own quotes, shown above, indicate that there are tremendous gaps in evolutionary theory.  And … you have more gaps than you’re admitting!

August 24, 79 A.D. – Pompeii was totally buried by deep volcanic ash from Mt. Vesuvius.  That’s slightly under 2,000 years ago.  Ahem, we know this for certain (due to eyewitness testimony of the time, and because this confirmed Roman city is currently under archaeological excavation).  Now then, is your research team composed of scientists or religious leaders?  One thing that evolutionists willfully hide from the public is the fact that the K-Ar radiometric dating method doesn’t work at all.  You can use K-Ar on volcanic ash, you see.  Do so.  You’ll find that the potassium-argon method does not work on volcanic flows where we know the exact date.  But then your priests turn right around and make claims of millions or billions of years for specific fossils and for layers of unknown ages.  There are also historical lava flows in Hawaii.  Why don’t you date a few of them using K-Ar?

Please see the enclosed article, “Is the Lava Dome on Mount St. Helens Really 1 Million Years Old?”  We, creationists, are actually the ones standing on the side of the scientific evidence.  Evolutionist, I am sorry to report, routinely hide from the full spectrum of scientific evidence and logic – particularly when evolutionary beliefs are challenged in any way.  You’ll have to answer to God someday anyway; so do the logical thing now and learn about all the solid evidence which shows your beliefs to be false.

In June I was working at a dinosaur dig in Eastern Montana for two weeks.  Interspersed with the huge ribs, T-Rex teeth, and other dinosaur fossil remains were pieces of wood and coal.  There were also random iron, sulfur, and clay accretions, etc.  Wood and coal.  Say, isn’t there a radiometric dating method that can be used on organic matter?  That’s right – it’s called C14, in fact.  We could check the possible age of the layer holding the dinosaur bones by using the C14 method.  To save you time – it’s already been done.  The dragon/dinosaur bones in such layers date to only thousands of years old.  You are free to still “believe” that they’re (millions) mythions and mythions of years old – but that openly violates the scientific evidence.  Either that or the C14 method doesn’t work.  You can’t have it both ways.  Evolution, as a belief regarding God’s “past mistakes” and weakness, has less to do with science than it does with man’s sinful nature.  A (believed) weak god can be ignored or put off.

To recap: less than 1% of known hominid fossils can possibly be interpreted to prop up evolution.  And that only after you’ve ignored the other 99%, and the likelihood of other scientific explanations for past skeletal deformities (like malnutrition).  Secondly, many Earth processes show our planet to be young.  One million years is a very long time.  The Earth can’t be that old … unless you place faith in the radiometric dating methods.  -Yet these can be scientifically shown to not work on matter or layers when the dates are known to us.  Even the wheat buried in the pyramids (of precisely known dates) show that C14 has to be “calibrated.”  And the dragon bones are more likely only thousands of years old, which corroborates with the eyewitness testimony of our ancestors on all inhabited continents – that our forbearers actually saw and occasionally interacted with dinosaurs (i.e. dragons).

There is much more that I could write:  the slowly increasing salinity of the Earth’s oceans (as a dating method), the helium levels increasing in the upper atmosphere, the speed at which Lewis & Clark actually crossed the entire North American continent vs. evolutionary beliefs in ever slow human migrations.  …You do know that a person can walk 3 miles per hour, right?  So in 10 hours, that would be 30 miles.  After 10 days of that – one could go 300 miles, right?  Wagon trains went from St. Louis to the Oregon Territory in but one Summer.  …But your “priests” still contend that the Americas were only settled over the course of dark, creeping millennia.  –That’s an irrational belief; one that presumes negatively upon the capabilities of our ancestors.  Sirs, evolutionary beliefs stand squarely against verifiable scientific (and historical) evidences.  They have no business in any science publication, such as Discover, dealing with “science, technology, and medicine” … but not religion, per se.
 

Sincerely,
 

Paul Abramson
P.O. Box (moved)
Berkeley, CA. 94---(moved)

Editor of:  www.creationism.org
 

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